While searching for the perfect home, one of the very first questions that most lenders, realtors, and/or sellers will ask concerns the percentage of down payment. What is a down payment, and why is it important? Quite simply, the down payment is the amount of cash the buyer will put towards the transaction. A higher percentage could equate to stronger negotiating power; or, it could give the seller increased confidence that the deal will go through smoothly. Each individual, however, has to ask how much does he or she need to put down and how much is he or she comfortable with.
There are many loan programs out there that all have their own down payment requirements. Financial analysts looked over all the historical data and determined that buyers who have 20 percent down payment at time of purchase are exponentially less likely to default on their loan. Because of that, conventional loans with a 20 percent down payment offer some of the most competitive...
Straddling the line between fall and winter, plenty and paucity, life and death, Halloween is a time of celebration and superstition. It is thought to have originated with the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, when people would light bonfires and wear costumes to ward off roaming ghosts. In the eighth century, Pope Gregory III designated November 1 as a time to honor all saints and martyrs; the holiday, All Saints’ Day, incorporated some of the traditions of Samhain. The evening before was known as All Hallows’ Eve and later Halloween. Over time, Halloween evolved into a secular, community-based event characterized by child-friendly activities such as trick-or-treating. In a number of countries around the world, as the days grow shorter and the nights get colder, people continue to usher in the winter season with gatherings, costumes and sweet treats.
Halloween’s origins date back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-in). The Celts, who lived 2,000 years ago in the area that is now Ireland, the United Kingdom and northern France, celebrated their new year on November 1. This day marked the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold winter, a time of year that was often associated with human death. Celts believed that on the night before the new year, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred. On the night of October 31 they celebrated Samhain, when it was believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth. In addition to causing trouble and damaging crops, Celts thought that the presence of the otherworldly spirits made it easier for the Druids, or Celtic priests, to make predictions about the future. For a people entirely...
Use these must-do fall maintenance tips to keep your house in shape and help keep you warm this winter.
In the market for a new place to hang your hat?
A new report by Realtor.com, released last week, found 35 percent of respondents reveal they have lived in a haunted home.
The survey also found about 62 percent of American home buyers are open to buying an abode that has a reputation for being haunted. How can you tell? According to the survey, home buyers believe a home has a better chance of being haunted if:
Most popular warning signs a home could be haunted:
Survey respondents said they are willing to purchase a haunted home at a discounted price – at least 30 percent less than market value -- but many said levitating objects, ghost sightings and seeing objects move from one place to another would be a deal breaker.
Spooky occurrences would stop them from buying a home:
For most people, buying their first home quickly changes from excitement to fear with daunting new terminology to learn, contracts to sign and obligations that may last 30 years or more. Many decide it's too much and take what I call the ostrich approach: they more or less bury their heads in the sand, taking the path of least resistance, often spending less than an hour examining a property before making an offer.
Almost always, they realize they've made avoidable mistakes costing thousands of dollars or more. For a typical buyer, it's well worth spending an extra 20 hours of time to save more than $10,000.
If you follow these ten critical rules of buying a first home, you'll put yourself in a position to avoid many of the common (and often expensive) traps. You'll also have the satisfaction of knowing you're in the minority that bought a home the smart way.
One caveat before beginning: I saved the most important and easiest rule for last so you'll remember it. These are the rules professional real estate buyers use that you should also follow.
For most homeowners, the most expensive component of a home is the interest expense on a mortgage. Before you begin shopping for a home, your first step is shopping for a mortgage. A natural first place to begin is your current bank that you already have a relationship with, but it certainly shouldn't be your last.
Make sure to check ...
(CNN) - I don't have teenagers yet, but watching my 8- and 10-year-olds spend endless amounts of time on iPads during spring break makes me worried about the day -- hopefully years from now -- when they have their own devices.
A cunning combo of classic and cool
It’s easy for a designer to maintain balance on the flatlands, where the style geography is totally traditional or meticulously modern. Navigating terrain that is neither one nor the other requires a more calibrated compass. Without it, transitional design can plunge into a purgatory where neither/nor translates as nothing much. No such danger for furniture and interior designer Megan Perry Yorgancioglu. The home she designed in Izmir, Turkey, for herself and her husband, Doruk, is a cunning combo of classic and cool.
“I’m a modern traditionalist. I definitely admire and respect the traditional style, but then I do love modern, clean-lined furniture and draperies,” explains Megan. “When we renovated our 14-year-old home last year, we wanted to keep the architectural details traditional—the moldings, doors, and wall paneling. But we wanted the furnishings and accents to be fresh and clean-lined.”
Freshness was a shoo-in. Megan handpicked pieces she had designed from scratch for the family furniture business. She is creative director and Doruk is CEO of Dorya USA, which they launched in 2010. Headquartered in Miami, it’s the American expansion of the handcrafted furniture company that Doruk’s parents started 30 years ago in Turkey.
The young couple met at George Washington University when she was studying interior design and he was honing up on international affairs. Now they spend half their time in Turkey, where the furniture is manufactured, and the rest in Florida, running the business. So far, it’s a full-throttle enterprise, with a showroom open year-round in High Point, North Carolina, in addition to the Miami base.
In Turkey, the Dorya...
Simplifying your life is a nice way of telling yourself to manage your stress. Today we are so overconnected and committed we hardly take a minute to take stock of ourselves and the value in our lives. Taking control of the things that feel “out of control” will help to reduce being overwhelmed. Here are a few suggestions:
Unfinished projects and piles are sources of stress, believe it or not. They are reminders of things we have to do or haven’t finished. Tackle one pile at a time. You may even get on a roll.
This will make you more happy. Remind yourself what you do have
and what is good in your life. Make a habit of shifting your perspective away from negative thoughts and toward positive ones.
Evaluate which relationships are focused on the right things and take steps away from those that aren’t. Relationships should be about thriving and positivity, not depleting you and making you feel...
Ready to sell your home?
Don’t just list it without any advance preparation. A few minor touch-ups can go a long way towards making a favorable impression on potential buyers — and perhaps cinching a deal.
“Put your buyer’s hat on and walk thru your home like it is the first time,” says Marilou Young, an Accredited Staging Professional and an Associate Broker with Virtual Properties Realty in the metropolitan Atlanta area.
“Make notes on what you, as a buyer, would notice,” Young advises, “and then repair or replace those items.”
Some of her top recommendations include getting rid of clutter, hiding family photos, cleaning out closets, removing excess or oversized furniture, and cleaning.
These tips are among the 21 top ways to prepare your home for a sale. Let’s look at the others:
1. Clean, clean, clean. Dust on top of the fireplace mantle and fan blades, polish your appliances and faucets, and give the windows a thorough washing. If you’ve already moved out or if you’re too busy to stay on top of things, consider hiring a cleaning service to stop by every couple of weeks.
2. Pay attention to smells. “Don’t cook bacon in your home the day of a showing,” advises Rachel Weinberg, a broker at Wright Kingdom Real Estate in Boulder, Colorado. “Although it might taste great, the smell is strong and lingers for a long time. You don’t want your home to smell like a fast food restaurant!”
3. Clear out the clutter. You want buyers to focus on how awesome your space is, not how messy it looks. Banish that piles of shoes from the entry, that stack of mail from the kitchen table and anything else that detracts from your home’s gorgeous features.
4. Repaint the walls neutral colors. As much...
Vanilla Cream Puff Dessert Recipe photo by Taste of Home
It’s no secret: Housing costs are expensive. Rising rents and a strong real estate market are making it harder for first-time buyers to get a piece of the American dream.
Buying a home means getting these four areas of your finances in shape:
If you do not know where you stand and if you want to make an offer on a home, getting pre-approved is an important first step. Getting your financial house in order should be priority No. 1 if you intend on buying a home now or down the line. A pre-approval involves having a lender ensure that your credit score is sufficient, you have the cash to close on the home, your income supports the debt load plus your other liabilities, and you have the financial character and capacity to make a big-ticket purchase. While credit score, income, and debt allowance are all important puzzle pieces, your cash to close reigns.
There are no more first-time buyer programs available. All the first-time buyer programs that did exist have long since expired.
While there is a possibility of finding a county, state, or HUD program to assist with down payment, the next order of business is coming up with closing...
Few things say comfort food, and satisfy the whole family, like chicken.
The trouble is, poultry prices fluctuate so much that you’ll quickly be uncomfortable with the effect chicken has on your budget.
With these six tips for the budget-conscious home cook, you and your family can get better value out of chicken meals.
1. Rethink Boneless
Sure, boneless chicken is easier to work with, but you pay a serious premium for that convenience. You’ll always save money with bone-in poultry, even if you lose a little time.
If cooking and cutting apart an entire bird is overwhelming, consider buying leg quarters and cutting them into thighs and drumsticks. You can also pick up bone-in chicken breast, since breasts are not only healthier, but also much simpler to de-bone before cooking.
Prepare your chicken using the butterfly technique (cut out the backbone and flatten it), and you’ll save cooking time because your chicken will stay flat in the oven. If you get a whole chicken, you can slice the entire bird down the middle and only roast one half at a time.
2. Hot Legs
Rod Stewart lyrics aside, chicken leg quarters consistently offer value even when they’re not on sale. Cook a bunch up at once and de-bone them, and you’ll be prepared for plenty of affordable chicken dinner ideas, like taco night, hot wing pizza, chicken pot pie, fried rice, and homemade soup.
I’ve seen bags of chicken leg quarters for as little as 29 cents per pound. Though you won’t always see a deal like that, use 59 cents per pound as a rule, and you’re still getting a great price....
We love the following article from Puryear Custom Pools. It is very informative and really sheds a light on important questions to ask when considering building a pool.
Photo Courtesy of Puryear Custom Pools - Click image to see more of their beautiful work
There are many things to consider before you choose the swimming pool builder that is right for you. Please read everything this has to offer in order to educate yourself about choosing your builder, protecting your monetary investment, the building process itself, and the protection of your investment after the pool is completed and paid for.
First let’s start with the Dallas/Ft. Worth Metroplex and what it has to offer. There are over 400 pool builders in this area. There are no licensing requirements to become a pool builder. A simple $12.00 payment to the Secretary of State and a catchy name is all it takes for someone to call themselves a pool contractor. The pool construction business is known for unscrupulous salesmen and shoddy and or incomplete construction. It is also the only construction business that takes payments up front prior to work being performed. This is a very bad equation for a trusting homeowner and a less than upstanding company. How do you weed out the bad companies? Listed below are several tips.
1. How many years has the company been in business and have they been in business under any other name? Also ask how long they have been in business in Texas. This is especially important right now. Pool builders from California and Arizona are rushing to Texas to build pools here. Our economy is much stronger. Do you want to build...
The story of this house in Mexico begun when architecture firm PRODUCTORA was challenged to re-purpose six parabolic modules: “A friend of ours inherited of a number of polyester structures recovered from a modular house where they used to spend their weekends in the 1970s. The owners bought a new plot of land in a small town, about one hour from Mexico City in order to accommodate these fiberglass shapes”, the architects explained. The first step was to force the volumes back to their original shape and cover them with a new coating of polyester and fiberglass.
[Photography: PRODUCTORA and Luis Gallardo]
The result is a highly original residence with dome-shaped ceilings and a vibrant interior feel: “At the scale of the whole plot, PRODUCTORA gave the powerful flower-like structure of the recycled domes a central position, while all the other additions are scattered around the plot. By considering the whole plot as an active field in which several activities take place (sleeping, cooking, swimming, sunbathing, guestrooms, grill area) the whole composition loses its centrifugal straight-jacket and becomes a more open and dynamic layout.” How would you comment on this unconventional architecture approach in Mexico?
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In this issue, we examine technology’s place in the home, and the way the new buzz-phrase “Internet of Things” is making life easier, more accessible, and maybe even more vulnerable as we adapt to an uncharted era.
In Toronto, Prishram Jain of TACT Architecture created a smart house that incorporates the same Control4 system he uses in his own home.
In our 15-year history, Dwell has pursued cutting-edge innovation through the question of what it means to be “at home in the modern world.” Our audience of early adopters and adventurous thinkers champion progressive design concepts, and demonstrate how these ideas influence everyday lives. We’re fascinated by the way that large corporations, independent start-ups, and energetic individuals are tapping into technology to devise solutions for better living. But we remain cautiously aware of how important it is to resist chasing the new simply for novelty’s sake—we always come back to the concept that good design should endure. Technology,...
